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Comment by chriszhang | Hacker News Reader

OMSCS by Georgia Institute of Technology is by far the best course I have come across. You get a degree too in the end. Caveat: It takes a lot of effort. It is like doing a full time course and the degree they award in the end is indistinguishable from a full time degree.

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Not surprising for a program that is literally called Online Master of Science in Computer Science. It's a master's degree program, in computer science, delivered online, by a university.

+OMSA (Analytics) +OMSCY (Cybersecurity)

These are fantastic programs that cost only $7-10k. https://omscentral.com has reviews of the classes, for the curious. My personal favorites are:

- Reverse Engineering and Binary Exploitation

- Reinforcement Learning and Decision-Making

- Bayesian Statistics

Have you gone through it?

I've dropped out. It's a lot of work, but the hardest part for me was staying engaged with the process without in person interaction.

Pandemic has been hell for me, too.

How did the program try to get students to interact with each other and with faculty?

I'm another dropout (loved some of the courses, especially the OS ones, have close-to-zero interest in machine learning, though, and that's maybe half of the class offerings), but to answer your question, all the courses I was in had a "participation" component to the grade where you were expected to ask/answer questions on the online forum thing for your class. There were also optional office hours, as I recall.

It was certainly nothing like just hanging out with colleagues in the cafe between classes, but for those (like me) who just can't go to a school like GT in-person, I'm glad the opportunity is available even though I'd say it's probably the hard-mode version of the program given the limited course catalog (not all courses are integrated into the program yet) and lack of in-person interaction.

Interesting. I would imagine that doesn't make you feel like your classmates are your peers, and it would be hard to make friends with them. Friendship or at least friendliness goes a long way towards motivating people to learn stuff. Moreover, networking is an important reason for going to grad school, but it seems like the school is not encouraging this.

Piazza (forums) and office hours (bluejeans--think youtube livestreams but on a proprietary platform.

For me, this semester, I finished a group project where we coordinated over slack/google hangouts. After that project, I didn't have anything left to finish the semester. I felt like I was done because the reinforcement loops I get from work (virtual back-clapping) were done and I had a hard time separating that from the "here's the next task. Also no one is talking to you about what needs to be done."

I'm 6 classes through it. Classes vary wildly in difficulty and applicability.

Favorites so far for me were AI4R (Ariticial Intelligence for Robotics) which is a more rigorous version of Udacity's Self-Driving Car course, ML4T (Machine Learning for Trading) where you implement various algorithms to optimize trading strategies, and ISYE 6501 (Intro to Analysis), which is a survey of various analysis techniques and ML algorithms.

Still have to take the reputed hardest course in the program, the General Algorithms course, the ML course, and an elective.

Worth the money, though I have had to skip a couple of semesters due to burnout. Work and this program are hard (for me).

I just complete my 9th class (GA) and have really enjoyed most of it. AI4R was great, but so was Adv Operating Systems and High Perf Computer Arch.

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